Growing up
in the proletariat class of communism, we never had much time to ponder over
our perennial hunger or our miserable state in life, we were too busy trying to
find something to eat, most of the time standing in lines daily to fight over
the supply of food allotted that day by the benevolent socialist government run
by the Communist Party.
Most of us were
quite thin, malnourished, lacking vitamins and proper nutrition, but we were
all in the same boat and we could do nothing about it as we had no arms to
mount a rebellion to overthrow the Communist Party.
The communists
and their sycophants ate well, lived well, and enjoyed all the luxuries they accumulated
by stealing everything of value that the proletariat at large had owned prior
to the Bolshevik revolution. Their bank accounts were full, they took nice
vacations and often, and we watched with resentment from afar.
We did not
have the opportunity to better ourselves, or to develop the inner talents we
were born with. We were too busy following the Communist Party rules and absurd
regulations, to make sure we did not violate any of them or else we were imprisoned
or re-educated in Siberia.
Creativity and
allowed speech had to follow strict Party guidelines or else be censored for
violating communist community standards, not unlike the social media moguls’
dictates today. But instead of being in Facebook jail for 30 days, you would
find yourself in real prisons and the jailers threw away the key until they saw
fit to let you go. Nobody followed the law, the law was what various Communist
Party apparatchiks decided on a whim.
Individuality
was verboten and nobody developed new ideas, projects, research, and other technical
gadgetry. Worthless group-think with strict guidelines that augmented the
collective was allowed.
I saw
through the windows of nice restaurants an abundance of food that was sorely
missing in our government-run empty stores. These restaurants were off-limits
for us as only the communist movers and shakers could afford such luxury. Mom was
making 800 lei per month which, divided by the artificially pegged exchange
rate of 12 lei to the dollar in 1980, it was about $67 a month from which we
had to buy food, pay for water, electricity, rent, bus fares, and medicine. Dad
was making slightly more, about 1,200 lei per month, a whopping sum of $100.
A fresh college
graduate with an Economics degree earned the huge sum of 1880 lei per month,
about $157 per month which allowed such a graduate to live a much better life
if they could find food and lived together with their parents in a small 600
square feet concrete block apartment, standard government issue subsidized
housing for all.
The
proletariat knew they were missing a lot – they saw how rich Texans lived on
the television series “Dallas” and their make-believe oil tycoon family. For
some reason, the decadent capitalist show passed the censors. Perhaps they
allowed the series on TV in order to show how evil capitalists were and that is
why we lived so poorly, they were stealing it from us. At least that was the
daily propaganda we heard on the two black and white television channels.
We were
riveted weekly to another episode so that we could live vicariously and imagine
what it would be like if we had their food, clothing, and the comforts of a
real home instead of the drab match boxes we were stacked on 5-9 stories high
after the wise Communist Party stole our private properties, homes, and land.
Before the
show ended, I moved to the U.S. in 1978 and, as the next season of Dallas
played on American television, my family back home was flooding me with
questions about the show such as “who killed J.R. Ewing,” but most of all, did
Americans live so well and did they have so much food?
I never
thought personally that food would become an issue 42 years later in America
due to a tyrannical government lockdown of the population under the guise of protecting
them from a flu virus. The lockdown caught many people unaware who were buying
food in smaller quantities and less frequently because many Americans ate in
restaurants several times a week.
As an
escapee from communism, the lockdown affected me much worse than it did many
Americans around me. They were happy to hide behind masks, stay home, watch TV,
get paid weekly for doing nothing, let government tell them what to do, where
to go, how, and when. They were happy to comply. But to me, removing the choice
of staying home or going out felt like the former communist life.
I went to
restaurants just like my American brethren and now, the government closed them
down and locked us in our homes with only permission to go to the grocery store
and pharmacies. Suddenly, once the state government removed any opportunity to
go to a restaurant, it felt much worse than when, under communism, we could not
afford to go. I felt the tyranny on a much deeper level.
The entire communist
country where I grew up was one big lockdown prison, with borders guarded with
machine guns, heavily armed soldiers, and razor sharp barbed wire. But in the
U.S., where radicals want to erase borders, we were bombarded by PSA
propaganda, i.e., “we are in this together,” “alone together,” “you are not
alone,” etc., all meant to increase and maintain population compliance. The
country became one big masquerade ball with masks made of all sorts of
materials including, as my friend Alexis joked, “Dr. Fauci’s underwear.”
I thought
that this was a much more insidious form of tyranny. When it became evident
that it was just a flu, the state and local government bureaucrats did not
relent their socialist control of the populace and people continued to remain cowardly
subdued, afraid of dying of the Covid-19 flu virus, while losing constitutional
freedoms each day without as much as a whimper.
The moral of
both experiences compared is that you can’t miss what you don’t have in the
first place, but it sure feels much worse when you do have something and that
something is taken away permanently.
The communist regime's misery is perfectly described...I lived it!... Now, the Cubans are going through the 4th generation under the same misery and lack of freedoms. Venezuela is testing it for more than one generations, Nicaragua, Honduras and a few more hellholes on our side of the Atlantic are also experiencing socialist equality under "PROLETARIAN PARADISES." It's nothing less than a life, where everyone is EQUALLY POOR, HUNGRY AND OPPRESSED by the regime!
ReplyDeleteI am a Canadian living in the US for 26 years. My father was Hungarian who escaped the revolution in 1956.
ReplyDeleteI know all about communism from my father. It is like I lived it through his stories.
I see how liberalism has made everybody stupid worldwide and how nwo is taking advantage of this stupidity. It remains to be seen whether God will have mercy on us or not. We will either die or become slaves of the nwo OR
rise up against them with the help of Trump and the generals.
Amen, Gilda!
DeleteI have not lived it. But I fear for our country, on the slippery slope toward it. Please keep sending out your message. Everyone needs to hear it.
ReplyDelete